Bare Bodies: Mirroring Pain on Stage
Steriani Tsintziloni*
Marina Otero’s Fuck Me at Onassis Dance Days (ODD) Saturday, March 4 2023. Athens, Greece.
I have always seen myself as at the centre of attention, as the heroine who takes revenge on anybody and anything. But my body was not strong enough.
These words of the Argentinian choreographer Marina Otero set the focus of her works based on autobiography, personal temperament and gendered identity. More particularly the work Fuck Me refers to her surgeries and hospitalisation due to spine problems and to the effects of a fragile body for a dancer, a woman and an individual. Her body, the body of a dancer is incapable of dancing, of keeping going, of making love and of experiencing the world as she used to.
In Athens Otero presented two works Fuck Me and Love Me in the context of Onassis Dance Days. The Festival, formerly known as Onassis New Choreographers Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary by expanding its scope to include invited artists from abroad. It took place after three days of national mourning for the train accident at Tempi which had cost the lives of more than fifty people (mostly young). It focused on female choreographers and presented a diverse range of choreographic voices who explored sexuality, tenderness, witchcraft, role stereotypes, gaze voyeurism; themes that took on unexpected connotations because of the mourning.
The performance of Fuck Me starts with five male dancers sitting in the audience, who take off their clothes and run on to the stage. A series of frenetic moves in an exaggerated exhibitionist manner confront and play with the audience’s attention. Five extremely capable male bodies offer the pleasure of virtuosic dance to the voyeuristic expectations of the viewers. Set to a kitschy sentimental Argentinian pop song, the scene plays with the exposition of a strip show and the fever of a dance party. This atmosphere is reversed by the shock of a female performer, Otero herself, who slowly walks on to the stage, contrasting her body-in-pain to the all-too-healthy male universe.
In a constant relationship with the male performers on stage she speaks to the audience through a microphone. She recalls her life and history, from her childhood in Argentina and her grandfather’s military links to the dictatorship, to her creative development and choreographic trajectory until the traumatic transformation of her life. These (autobiographical but also possibly fictional) stories unfold through narrative, video and live action to provoke the audience’s imagination. “It’s part of a never-ending project in which I’m my own research object, mostly because I like to talk about me…And if I don’t speak, who will?” says Otero. Her amplified voice expresses thoughts, facts, desires as she exposes herself to the eyes of the spectators, while at the same time claiming her own right to be herself. As the narrator, commentator and creator she is the protagonist and the victim.
The dancers are presented at times as different personae of Otero, at other times as different versions of ‘Pablo’, merging their own history with the requirements of the choreography. Their fierce physicality, backing her narration, questions canonical gender roles, making her the absolute authority and them ‘bare bodies’. A constant shift of references is at play.
The five male performers, wearing ankle boots and knee-pads (and at times military hats and pants), burst on stage with their energetic dancing presence. They thrust their bodies into the air, lift their legs, seductively swing their hips, touch their genitals and march around making references to military drills, macho sex shows and virtuosic dancing. They present themselves in different subject positions, as stereotypical male objects of desire, as bearers of power and domination, as emancipated individuals. The same goes for Otero. At one point, despite her pain, she stands naked at the front of the stage facing the audience, touches her genitals and screams to a loudspeaker ‘fuck me, fuck me, fuck me’.
Most of the scenes operate as condensed forms of multiple, even contradictory meanings and feelings. Near the middle of the work, a pivotal scene is presented.
Otero narrates her injury and the way she was experiencing the immobility of her body while creating this work. Her female ‘carnivorous’ [sic] sexual appetite, often linked to stereotypes of passionate Latinos, is captured in the title of the piece, referring to her inability to make love during the creation of the work due to her health condition. Video footage captures her last day in the studio, her “last dance” before surgery. Accompanied by a love song, the video of this dance is projected on the back of the stage while the whole scene is re-enacted live, with a male dancer in high heels and wig dancing her part. He takes her role and duplicates her identity. Fluidity of identity, the constant flux of subject formation and the fragility of our relational connection to others is physically enacted as her (and his) body swirl into the air while another dancer holds their legs and spins them around. In the video she kisses, touches and is touched; her body has been manipulated, sexual harassment is in the air, theatre voyeurism is at play but with her constant gaze towards the camera and her facial reactions as indications of pleasure she offers strategies of resisting her victimisation, of the right to sexual desire and to personal empowerment.
The scene comments on misidentification or on the constructivist nature of identity formation, the performative aspect of gender behaviour, but also on our role as audience members. It presents an overlap of time and of geography (then in the studio in Argentina, now here on stage in Athens) for the audience’s perception to spin around, as the male dancers spin Otero and her replica around. By replicating and re-enacting this scene, she offers a distance for critical reflection but also a double mirroring on multiplication of perceptions, a lack of absolute positioning. Otero herself in the video becomes one of her male performers on stage, while her male partner in the video becomes the camera’s lens and consequently the camera is the audience’s viewpoint to the scene.
The ‘instability of frames’ or ‘fluidity of frames of reference’ from the microlevel of Otero’s personal story to Argentinian history to the accident of a dancer and to the collective trauma of a body in pain cut across the choreography. Commenting on her body-in-pain she speaks of all dancing bodies that are precarious and vulnerable to injury and probably to all bodies in danger.
Otero constantly engages the audience to critically be part of the play, as she directly comments on our role as cultural consumers and on the programmers of Festivals who usually exoticise non-European artists while including them in the global market of cultural economics.
Eclectically mixing the brutal energy of dance theatre, the (auto)biography of a documentary piece, the naked seduction of a strip show, and the intellectual wit of a conceptual work, Fuck Me speaks of the body in pain on a personal and collective level. Music, movement, narration and images interweave in a theatrical fabric as multiple forms of dramaturgical devices: they harmonically build scenic action, they juxtapose each other in a critical manner, they comment one on another, they address the audience to actively think and witness. Fuck Me offers an extremely well-crafted composition, a rollercoaster experience of sensitivity/sensibility for the viewer, as Otero questions but also reaffirms the superficiality of contemporary art.
*Steriani Tsintziloni (PhD, University of Roehampton) is dance scholar, lecturer and curator based in Athens (GR). As curator she collaborated with the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (2016-2019), the Kalamata International Dance Festival (1998-2015) and the Onassis New Choreographers Festival (2021). In 2020-2021 Steriani was selected for the Visiting Artist Program at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS Washington). Her monograph Under the Shadow of Parthenon. Dance in the Athens Festival of the Cold War (1955-1966) was published in 2022 (in Greek).
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